What Do You Think of Wappler's Front End Design Tools?

Following an interesting post about Wappler’s front end design tools this week, I’d love to hear everyone’s views about them.

  • What parts do you love?
  • What parts do you long to be improved?
  • Which parts don’t you use and why?

It helps me to understand if there are better ways to be using them!

Best wishes,
Antony.

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Hope you’re not opening up old wounds here Antony :slight_smile:

So for me…

I love

  • How immediately I see my design changes.
  • How I can select code, design items or app structure items.
  • How I can move from design editing to code editing
  • All the Bootstrap and CSS support
  • All the features of the code editor
  • The basic idea of the Data Formats window
  • Ease of managing responsive designs
  • In general, I love the environment

I long to see improved

  • More flexibility in what can be moved and added in App Structure, or at least documentation that explains a methodology for what we have now.
  • Less jumping around of the App Structure window when I make changes
  • Speed improvements in the Data Bindings search window.
  • The Data Formats window become a true equation editor.
  • There not be 3-5 scrolls in the design window when I make certain changes.
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I’ve grown to love the Wappler front end design tools. I use Bootstrap 4 as standard and feel completely at home with the container, row, column, content approach and can get any visual design accomplished with this.

The way classes are used and edited is something I suspect I’ve not fully utilised as I still open the style.css file and manually write my styling there.

I have a Pinegrow license and in the early days I was asking for Wappler to have the level of front-end features that Pinegrow has. Recently I built a quick one-page site for someone and would normally go to Pinegrow for this but immediately felt Wappler would get it done quicker so that’s what I used. Familiarity will certainly play a part but Wappler has become a very good tool for front end now.

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No, just looking for some serious and detailed debate that will be a benefit to all concerned… hopefully conducted in a warm and friendly manner! :slight_smile:

And… I am curious to know if the way I am using them is the same or different to other people!

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Antony, half of your post sounds to me like you are experiencing some issues, which have not been reported (of course with the exact steps to reproduce them). If you just keep these issues for yourself, it’s highly possible they will never be fixed or improved.
Please log each of the issues you are having with jumping/scrolling etc. so that we can improve this …

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Thanks for your feedback @Teodor… the jumping around of the app window I have seen reported before so I do not want to repeat that one. The “3-5 scrolls” one I cannot consistently recreate so I have not reported it yet.

We need step by step explanation where exactly any of these happen so we can recreate them locally and fix them. Working 12 hours per day entirely in Wappler i see no jumping or scrolling … maybe it’s something specific for your project, but it would be best if you provide the step to recreate it.

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What parts do you love?

Code view.

What parts do you long to be improved?

More code view.

Which parts don’t you use and why?

Design view, because of code view.

All in all, I am here for SC, AC, BS4 integration and specially because of the team.

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I spend most of my time in Code view as well, but I’d love for that to change. Two big blockers for me using Design view (at least at 3.2.0 – I’m not touching 3.3 yet!)

A) With fw7, it just doesn’t represent what I’ve built and

B) This feature request: Editor authorization persist across tabs There needs to be a way to globally login within the editor and have that persist.

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Hi, for some time I have been reading in this forum about “why doesn’t Wappler have graphics and animation tools like Webflow, bootstrap studio, pinegrow, etc”, "Wappler’s design tools are primitive, we would like them to be like those of Webflow "and so many other comments.

So I come to ask you the following question: how many design tools are there on the market that allow you to do all this repeatedly and on the other hand, how many tools allow you to program complete professional applications using the latest technology such as: Node.js, Docker, Reactive Framework for the FrontEnd, as powerful or more than React.js, a server-side framework (AppServer connect) so powerful that we can do almost anything with it, components that we can include and customize such as Flow, Fullcalendar, Sliders, Swiper, Action Scheduler, notifications, alerts, Toasts, etc.?

This is just my opinion and it does not go against anyone, but sometimes I feel that many want Wappler to end up being a product in a nice box like the rest and they do not realize that all those things that Webflow has many other platforms have, and everything important that Wappler has that allows us to develop applications and functionalities at a professional level, are nowhere else in the visual way as we find it in Wappler, which allows us to develop applications quickly and at the same time teaches us to work as true developers and not like children doing anything without understanding how it works. Wappler is in some way educational, those who do not know, learn to work for example in an MVC model (Model, View, Controller) and that I have not seen anywhere else.

Finally, Wappler makes us owners of the code we generate, which means that it does not tie us to its platform as developers.

So I really ask you: do we want Wappler to have more beautiful menus with fanzy animations like the hundreds of applications that already exist and that many are compatible with Wappler because they use bootstrap or do we want Wappler to be a serious software development tool as it has been? ?
Do we want the Wappler team to work on functionalities that really make the difference with any other platform or to spend that time making the menus more didactic, beautiful and with better animations?

For me the answer is clear. For you?

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Brave man, good on ya, important discussion but I think I have said my bit :grin: until the customer base grows beyond the current cohort there are plenty of tools in the toolbox to fill in the gaps.

Hi Max, exactly my thoughts!
I don’t want Wappler to turn into the next Wix builder. The design tools are currently great and allow you to build whatever you want and customize it as you like.

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Wappler is also constantly improving itself. So also it’s visual editors but we listen carefully to you our users and act accordingly.

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A post was split to a new topic: Page styling question

Sorry to bump an old thread. I don’t really quite understand tech jargon. Does Wappler and Bootstrap have the ability to give me the same beautiful components and features like Vue/React? I am interested in Wappler because it makes serious software that I can keep. I just don’t understand in my desired front end is possible or if I can make it elsewhere and just import it here. What do you think? Thank you